According to this new report from the Educational Testing Service, at this point American Millennials that have a four year college degree are essentially on the same intellectual […]
Saturday, March 21st, 2015
Michael Balter , - Science
Stephan: I just love DNA research; it is cutting through so much mythology and nonsense. If you are Jewish and come from an Ashkenazi heritage — which is to say the overwhelming percentage of Jews in the U.S. — do you think of yourself as Italian? Probably not, but it seems you probably are. It also seems that most assumptions Jews have traditionally held about their lineage are going to have to be reassessed... or not. Religions as a rule are remarkably resistant if not outright hostile to facts so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Modern Jews may traditionally trace their ancestry to the Holy Land, but a new genetic study finds otherwise. A detailed look at thousands of genomes finds that Ashkenazim—who make up roughly 80% of the world’s Jews, including 90% of those in America and half of those in Israel—ultimately came not from the Middle East, but from Western Europe, perhaps Italy.
Most mainstream historians regard Ashkenazim as the descendants of Jews who moved into central Europe from the Middle East sometime before the 12th century C.E. Ashekenazim, like most members of this religious, cultural, and ethnic group, traditionally trace their ancestry to the ancient Israelites. The Israelites, in turn, arose between 3000 and 4000 years ago in the Middle East, according to both Biblical sources and archaeological evidence. They dispersed after the Romans destroyed their Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.
Recent genetic work has supported this traditional view. Two studies, one led by geneticist Harry Ostrer of the New York University School of Medicine, and the other by geneticist Doron Behar of the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, traced the three main Diaspora groups—Ashkenazim, Sephardim from Spain and Portugal, and Oriental Jews from the Middle East—to people who […]
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Saturday, March 21st, 2015
David Edwards, Lecturer of Conservation Science - The Raw Story/The University of Sheffield (U.K.)
Stephan: It has really gotten down to a race. Will we destabilize the Earth to the point where we destroy civilization? Or will we wake up and change ourselves? Will we make the life-affirming choice? Today I would say it was about 65 - 35 that we won't make it. But maybe I am just cynical today. Where would you put it? Ask yourself that, and answer honestly. You don't have to tell anyone.
Australian rain-forest in late afternoon.
Credit: Shutterstick
Much of the Earth was once cloaked in vast forests, from the subarctic snowforests to the Amazon and Congo basins. As humankind colonised the far corners of our planet, we cleared large areas to harvest wood, make way for farmland, and build towns and cities.
The loss of forest has wrought dramatic consequences for biodiversity and is the primary driver of the global extinction crisis. I work in Borneo where huge expanses of tropical forest are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. The biological cost is the replacement of some 150 forest bird species with a few tens of farmland species. But forest is also frequently retained inside or at the edges of oil palm plantations, and this is a pattern that is replicated globally.
The problem, according to new research published in Science Advances, is that the vast majority of remaining forests are fragmented. In other words, remaining forests are increasingly isolated from other forests by a sea […]
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